The third world war is already under way. The enemy is inside our country — inside our homes, our cars, even in our pockets. Military might is no match for cyberwarfare, and make no mistake: The United States is under attack.

Fighting back is General Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, former commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, and former chief of the Central Security Service. He is the founder, co-chief executive officer and chairman of the board at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., which was founded in 2014.

Alexander spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed the cyberthreat and ways to combat it (see the full interview with transcript here.) (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: What are the cyberthreats that keep you up at night?

Alexander: I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property. That’s our future. Imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us, and beating us. That’s kind of what Huawei did, taking Cisco code.

Furrier: In my opinion, we have a digital war happening, whether you call it that or not. Why don’t we just have a digital force to counter it?  

Alexander: You’re right. You need a force, and that force is Cyber Command. There’s an issue, though. Cyber Command cannot see the attacks on our country, so they’re left to try to go after the offense. They don’t see these devastating attacks. They don’t see the threats.

So, the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible. Make it so our nation can defend itself in cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. We have to create the new norm for visibility in cyberspace.

Knight: How do you do that?

Alexander: The way you do it is to start at the beginning: What’s happening to the network? You’ve got to be able to see the attacks. All the attacks. So that’s anomaly detection. Then you need a machine-learning expert system, artificial intelligence, to help you go at the speeds the attackers will go at.

Take fake news. This is a big problem. MIT has done some studies, and people are 70% more likely to retweet fake news than they are the facts. 

The reason that countries do it, like Russia in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It’s like going into a bar, and you go to him: “He thinks you’re ugly,” and you go to me: “He thinks you’re ugly.” We start arguing, but you started it. We didn’t even talk. That’s what Russia does, and at scale.

Furrier: In digital infrastructure, there are roads. There are packets moving around. There are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored or reset. But the payload — malware, fake news, whatever it is –– there’s an interaction between payload and infrastructure. As a commander, what are your thoughts and reaction to combating this?

Alexander: My gut reaction is we will have to change how we think about that. It’s not roads and avenues: It’s all the environment. Now the whole world’s opened up. It’s like “The Matrix“: You open it up, and there it is. It’s everything.

So, what we have to think about is, if it’s everything, how do we operate in a world where you have both truth and fiction? That’s the harder problem. Some of it is fake, some of it’s not, and that’s what makes it so difficult for the public.  This is something where I think journalists, historians and others can come together and say, “You know, that doesn’t make sense. Let’s get the facts.”

Furrier: It’s a data problem. Data is critical for the systems to work, whether it be the visibility of the data, having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets to a lot of the consequences. In a video game, if you have lag, you’re dead. Military lagging is not a game. People are potentially losing their lives if they don’t have the right tactical edge access to technology.

Alexander: The military’s effort to go to the cloud is a great step forward because it addresses just what you’re saying. For mobile forces, that’s the future. You don’t carry a data center around with an infantry battalion, so you want that elasticity and you need the conductivity and you need the training to go with it. It gets back to: How do you interpret the information?

Knight: How often do you look back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat versus what you’re doing today in terms of thinking about threats.

Alexander: A lot. Because in the military, when you have troops in danger, your first thought is, how can I do more? How can I do better? What can I do to get them the intelligence they need? Pressure is a great innovator.

Furrier: Tell us about IronNet Cybersecurity.  You founded the company to apply your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and innovative tech, correct?

Alexander: When I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations was that we can’t see attacks on our country. And that’s the commercial sector that needs to help go fix that; the government can’t. So, my thought was to fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government.

What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system … with machine learning and AI that helps you understand what’s going on. Then share that with the government so they can see that picture, so they have a chance of defending our country.

We are getting traction. I think within a year what we deploy with the companies and what we push up with cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with government will change the way we think about cybersecurity.

Furrier: What do the policymakers need to do?

Alexander: Ensure we fix the acquisition process, streamline it. And allow commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE